Site Administrator's Blog

After part 1 and part 2, JupiterResearch just published the latest piece of research on long-term mobile trends in the European markets: "European Mobile Media Forecast, 2008 to 2013: Identifying Revenue Growth in a New and Challenging Ecosystem".

Key Takeaways:

Increasingly, consumers will not pay a premium for mobile content they can access for free online through a more convenient PC/laptop experience. As a consequence, mobile paying audiences will represent a limited share of the overall mobile content audience.

Mobile content will thus increasingly transition to use of ad-funded revenue models.

However, due to numerous niche audiences of core users of mobile video, TV, music, and games, mobile content revenues will grow to €5.4 billion by 2013. Despite having significantly tempered forecast on specific content categories, these forecasts are based on assumptions made about consumers' potential spending before the financial crisis during the third quarter of 2008. When moving into the consumer economy, discretionary spending could be hit, thus having some downward impact on non-core telecom spending. As the global economic crisis continues, Nokia's head of gaming Jaakko Kaidesoja just said he expected that the overall gaming market is likely not to grow in 2009. In an interview to Reuters, he however stated that some segments would grow--including pre-loaded games, emerging markets,and iPhone, not to mention N-Gage (naturally).

With mobile content revenues only partly compensating for the decline in short message service (SMS) revenues (decreasing by €5.3 billion from 2007 to 2013), mobile operators have no choice but to increasingly focus on mobile data access, mobile broadband and new communication revenues.

Updated on Nov 8th: I will be on paternity leave until end November, so I will reconnect early December